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GSoC 2017 Starts

Dear reader,

it was a long time without a blog post – If you want a very quick overview over great stuff happening at coala, GitMate, my life just read the headings 🙂 For more details, I’m afraid you’ll actually have to read it.

coala gets 10 GSoC Students

Last year went away fast and a new GSoC is coming for coala and me.

First things first: as unbelievable as it is, coala got 10 slots for Google Summer of Code as an own organization (first year!). We received more than 50 applications out of which only one or two were spam.

Unfortunately that means we couldn’t take a lot of students. A lot. Good students. Great. Students.

We did have some serious problems during the application phase and there were things that could have been done better from the admin side – making the competition more fair. The truth is: we weren’t prepared for so many so good applications and our processes were not decentral enough; too much work was done by the admin team directly and not enough by the mentors. We’ve learned our lesson and will have some serious iteration on how to make better processes for GSoC in 2017.

On, to better parts. We now have 10 students who definitely deserved a slot out of which I have the honour to mentor/comentor two together with my git-mate Fabian Neuschmidt:

The bonding phase has started and this year we are using GitLab milestones more strictly to track all projects. For every project we have a milestone for every phase. Check https://gitlab.com/coala/GSoC-2017/milestones/ and you’ll immediately get an impression on the progress of each and every project.

Using GitLab Burndown Charts for GSoC is Awesome

It is super crucial to know wether your student is on track with his GSoC project so you can see if things go wrong. With GitLab we can use burndown charts to identify those issues earlier. This is the first time we’re doing this so everyone is a bit behind schedule, we’re just trying it out but as the GSoC progresses we’ll get more strict about this.

I’m very happy to work with Naveen and Hemang this year, they’re totally into their projects, highly motivated and really add something to the community – we can learn a lot with each other!

If you visit gitmate.io now you will find a fully functional web app that allows you to configure GitHub plugins. The coala code analysis plugin isn’t ready yet but we’re working on it full steam and the first few plugins are totally ready.

With GitMate you can do any automation for PRs, issues, etc. – any events on GitHub and soon other platforms as well (if we’re good we’ll have email support soon so GitMate can automatically review linux kernel patches :)).

We’ll give you more updates about gitmate at blog.gitmate.io if we find time to actually do blog. Are you thinking about using this in your OS project or company? Shoot me an email at lasse@gitmate.io!

Thanks to the great Yuki who is constantly bored and thus lives a major part of his life in the caves below the DigitalOcean all coala websites and GitMate are now properly deployed and maintained.

Also we’re finally getting more and more content on blog.coala.io with the GSoC students (who we’re shamelessly forcing to blog) but also the coala community team with brilliant efforts like coala recipes and other fun contests. This is awesome 🙂

PyCon(s?) Come to EuroPython!

I’ve been travelling a bit. You might have seen me if you visited some PyCon. It’s a lot of fun and I’ve been meeting many many people! I’m seeing forward to EuroPython where we’re trying to get many coalaians. We’re also in contact with the PyTest community to maybe do a joint sprint or so – I’m so much seeing forward to that.